• Barack Obama. Blago wanted to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder.
• Rahm Emanuel Obama's incoming chief of staff was the one Blago wanted to negotiate with—he hoped to get stuff from Rahm in exchange for picking Obama's preferred candidate. Also Rahm maybe alerted the feds!
• Tony Rezko This Chicago fundraiser and felon raised a fortune for Blago, and a smaller fortune for Obama back in the day. From Blago he got plum appointments for associates and friends, and lord knows what else.
• Sam Zell Blago was unhappy with the Chicago Tribune's coverage of how corrupt he was, so he told the owner of their parent company, Zell, to make them cut it out. Zell, who needed the state's help to unload the Chicago Cubs, allegedly agreed to look into it. Zell also connects us to Lee Abrams! Abrams is Zell's friend and Tribune Co's insane "Chief Innovation Officer." He will hopefully have a crazy memo about this soon.
• John McCormick This is the Tribune editor who was mean to Blago all the time. Supposedly Zell agreed to have him "restructured" out of his job in exchange for state help with Tribune's bankruptcy, but this didn't actually happen.
• Patrick Fitzgerald the dreamboat US Attorney who's bringing Blago down is known as a tenacious prosecutor, and he was already famous for his role investigating Plamegate, the weird old scandal in which Bush administration officials leaked the name of a covert CIA operative to journalists to damager her husband's credibility. That scandal, as we all remember, ended up with Times reporter and terrible hack Judy Miller going to jail rather than revealing to Fitzgerald that her source was Scooter Libby, even though Libby had already given her permission to reveal this.
• Jesse Jackson Jr. It's sill possible that "Senate Candidate 5" is Jesse Jackson, Jr. Even if he isn't, he's a family friend of the Obamas (specifically his childhood friend Michelle) who is seen by many as a front-runner for Obama's vacant seat. So Blago would obviously have been in contact with him regarding the seat, and what Blago wanted in exchange for giving it to him. Meanwhile Jackson's brother Yusef was an investor in a magazine called Radar with pervy billionaire friend-of-Clinton Ron Burkle!
• Also Jesse Jackson Sr was on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as was Kelly Preson, who was in Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon!

Burkle made his money with supermarkets. It is quite profitable, of course, to own all the supermarkets, because people need to eat. But, you know, it's not very glamorous! And Burkle enjoys flying around on his private jet with famous people, and globe trotting with politicians, and partying, and models. He likes models. One can enjoy this lifestyle with supermarket billions, but isn't it more fun to enjoy it with media holdings?

So at some point he and Jackson decided to invest in Maer Roshan's crazy magazine about "pop and politics and pop culture and scandal and pop" or whatever the hell the tagline of Radar 3.0 was. And they gave him 15 issues to do with as he pleased, and he did eventually turn out a pretty good product. But the money wasn't there, because it was a new magazine, and there's not even money for old magazines anymore.

And honestly it was probably not as exciting and fun to own a magazine as Burkle thought it would be! It's tough, because he also wanted to secretly own the magazine, and no one who secretly owns things gets the same pleasure Rupert Murdoch does from personally tearing up the Wall Street Journal and remaking it in his image. And Murdoch loves newspapers. There's really never been any evidence that Burkle loves magazines. Murdoch will take a loss for years on something like the New York Post. Burkle didn't give Roshan the five years he said it'd take to break even on Radar before he pulled the plug. Because if it's not subsidizing his lifestyle, it's not worth the cash. He's a capitalist, obviously, and Radar was not a charitable endeavor, but if we had his fortune we wouldn't mind wasting it on the talent Roshan brought together.

Back to controlling distribution and sales of food! Unlike media, mac and cheese is recession-proof!

Michelle Obama went to high school with the Reverend's oldest child, Santita Jackson. So young Michelle was a "frequent" Jackson family house guest. In fact: "Michelle and Santita kind of babysat for Junior and Yusef and Jonathan [the third Jackson son] and oversaw the kids when the parents were gone," an old Jackson family advisor told TNR.

And it gets a little complicated here. Michelle is an old Jackson family friend. Junior has been campaigning for Obama—campaigning hard. But Yusef is BFF with supermarket mogul Ron Burkle, who is BFF with Bill Clinton, so Yusef raised money for Hillary. Yusef also—with Burkle—owns Radar!

Now that Clinton's out of the race, all the Jacksons are ostensibly behind Obama. Though Jesse Sr is obviously a bit ambivalent.

BUT it's worth noting (Nick is gone today so we're putting on our Denton Caps as we throw this out there) that not only has Radar not, in any of its forms, covered this recent Jackson scandal, it's also been very kind to Michelle Obama (this is the sum total of their coverage of her "first time in my adult life, I'm really proud of my country" remark). Of course, we've been pretty kind to her too, because we think she's pretty awesome. But still! She didn't go to grammar school with the older sister of our secret owner! TRANSPARENCY!

For sure, Radar's hacks have avoided the story of the "nuts" slip by Yusef's father, the Reverend Jesse. But it's not as if that's stifled the story, and Radar's silence merely draws further notice to the tangled connections between the magazine and its investors. It's a perfect excuse to explore Yusef Jackson's murky fortune.

The money for Yusef Jackson's investment in Radar comes from a highly profitable Chicago distributorship for Anheuser-Busch, the makers of Budweiser beer. And Yusef took possession of that cash-cow after meeting August Busch IV, heir to the beer fortune and now chief executive, at an event to promote black entrepreneurship in 1996. Their two fathers had clashed back in the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson's followers protested the lack of minority-owned Anheuser-Busch distributorships.

A couple of years later, the beer-maker assuaged restive minority workers at one of its biggest Chicago affiliates by offering the business to the Reverend's son. And who made the reconciliation between the Jackson and Busch dynasties possible? Why California supermarket tycoon Ron Burkle, of course, host of the event at which the two scions met.

The younger Busch and Burkle also both bankrolled Yusef's first media venture, a dotcom bubble website called OneNetNow.com, which was supposed to bring more minorities to the internet. The billionaire grocer and Yusef also teamed up to bid for the right-wing Chicago newspaper, the Sun-Tribune.

Burkle's munificence—from a fortune built on low-paid supermarket workers—has even extended to the once-fiery Reverend's extended family. The wealthy Friend-of-Bill, whom Jackson has helped maintain labor peace at his supermarkets, helped house the Reverend's illegitimate child by Karin Stanford, and put the mother on his payroll. One doesn't like to agree too often with Bill O'Reilly, but he's probably justified in calling Burkle the "sugar daddy" of the Jackson family.

All of which is to say: money and favors are exchanged just as eagerly by members of the liberal elite as by the conservatives who have traditionally monopolized business in the US. If anything though, they are even more prone to make vanity investments, such as Yusef Jackson's in Radar, as if they imagine this is what rich people do.

"If Bush can be president, why can't Yusef and Jonathan have a distributorship?" Jesse Jackson told critics at a meeting of the Chicago Association of Black Journalists in 2001, with a wonderful sense of entitlement. Yusef is as much entitled to as much help from family friends as the heir to any white dynasty; to any distributorship he can secure; and to any magazine he's foolish enough to fund. And with that privilege also comes the occasional item such as this, calling into question the origins of his fortune, and his motives as a media investor.

Radar's website has studiously ignored the day's hottest story—just as it sidestepped the juicy revelations about conman Raffaello Follieri's relationship with supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle, and the Hollywood rumors of an affair between actress Gina Gershon and former president Bill Clinton.

Burkle's involvement in the pop culture magazine has never been acknowledged, but he joined Yusef in a bid for the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004—and Radar's unusual discretion in covering stories about the California tycoon and his buddy Bill pretty much confirm the creepy Burkle is in Yusef's consortium. "It's fair to say the restrictions that come with Radar's funding are getting more inconvenient," says a veteran of the magazine. Radar's Maer Roshan did not respond to a request for comment.

One shouldn't give too hard a time to Radar, however. It's not as if New York magazine made any mention of financier Bruce Wasserstein's marriage breakup earlier this week. Every publication has investors it can't afford to offend; it's just that Radar has had a lot of them, and it really can't afford to offend them.

Update: Maer Roshan did indeed respond, with a zinger!

Q. Hey, Maer — where's your Jesse Jackson "nuts" piece? (In the same place as all the Burkle coverage?) ;)

A. Actually, it's in the same place as our item on you going down on a go-go boy at Urge on Thursday night.. But while we're on the subject, have I missed Gawker's coverage of the Jezebel fiasco?

It's all these Clinton-friending liberal rich people who keep getting into messes these days, isn't it? When's the last time you heard anything about rich Republican financiers and executives flying about the nation with models, fucking teenagers, and carrying on sex orgies with movie stars? Is it the liberal connection to godless Hollywood? Former United Artists CEO and Bush Super Ranger Jerry Weintraub stays out of the headlines. Ken Lay was busted for fraud, not massages.

Hell, maybe liberals just have more fun? That's the point of liberality, isn't it? Those European values, that subjective morality, the godless thing? Clinton was impeached for having too much fun in office. Nixon never had fun ever except when he got zonked on painkillers and insulted the Jews, which is not really anyone's idea of a truly good time. Epstein never saw anything wrong with what he did. He just likes massages!

But why the need to congregate around Burkle? To hang out with him? Why did Epstein and Chris Tucker need to fly around on Jeff's private jet? Why does Clinton need to fly around the world on everyone's private jet? Liberal types do like to improve the world, and the rich ones are narcissistic enough to believe that they can do it personally. So they network and party and fuck models while flying to Africa to cure AIDS! Conservative zillionaires just rack up huge profits, contribute money to candidates who can ensure that they'll continue to rack up huge profits, and mind their own fucking (criminal) business. The liberals need to have cake with Arianna Huffington and Bono, for some reason.

So it may just be that Burkle embodies these characteristics the most. The most narcissistic, the most convinced of his own rightness, the most desperate to network with powerful people in the hopes of reshaping the world.

And then they all get tied up in sex scandals and your house is foreclosed, the end.